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Sunday, August 1, 2010

My but it's clean!Streamlined, its signs truncatedlike the elm next door – ATM -("atmosphere?" you might’ve speculated) --but at least there's COFFEE left,white weave on an oval of Delft blue weft,its first syllable loomingsoft as in "CA-sa Mariana",Walcott soft, softer even than rumoursrelayed in Lowell's pseudo-southern drawl,softer certainly than the cot somebody leftagainst the wall in your old bedroom,where the skylight's secured from the windwith a pair of snub-nosed scissorsleft by some roomer put to rest at last here.

Signs of the times left about just everywhere.The yellow diamond for CAUTION you'd swearfrom a distance was meant to say YIELDto agnostics: black arrow picking out the plaqueon Saint James's Church, or maybe the church itself,with its dentil moulding, and still somewhat hopefully spired.Caddy-corner from here and off in the shadethe Great Village & District Volunteer Fire Brigadehas CIVIC NO SIGNS FOR SALE. Just PHONE668-2314. But perhaps you'd as soon Myles leftyou alone? Is he the letter carrier, too, on foot since the lastof three loved autos went? Or has he been put outto pasture? Was all this heaven-sent?Anyhow, last Sunday morning he played the Lord Godin The Potter and the Clay -- an experiment: a mod-ern service, "not something we normally do," said the pastor.Coming here is like coming to your senses, only faster:sight striated by the parlour window's chequerboardof bubbly, wavy glass, with certain panes too perfect, flat,clear; sounds of central heating but lately acquired."Feel free to make an entry" on the cover of the house journalsomebody left on a shelf, this house once hauledfrom Scrabble Hill and left now across from --

My but it's clean!Like the view of a sky from the kitchen windowor E. M. Forster's Machine --WILSONS GAS STOPS -- a windrow of tire-tracked snowwhere somebody left a portasign of that No Name yellowrepeated evidence has proved you can't not look at.It was cold when poor Tony was left without his jacketto set its black block letters, one by one.Fetch from its battered tin bucket the squeegeeleft there to do the windshield of Mrs. Layton's car,or later (so, so, so much later), leaving all that aside,stare out over Minas Basin and the dikes the Frenchleft behind, their outskirts defeated yellow,dim against the bright sky of a high window.

2 comments:

This is lovely! - And it makes me more eager than ever to see Great Village. It seems to be a place where the beneficent ghosts and shadows of the past mingle gently and impalpably with those of our century, like a sort of transparent palimpsest. It also reinforces my inexplicable sense that I must have seen GV when visiting Nova Scotia in my youth fifty years ago or so. Thanks for posting it!

Time and space (or their originally undifferentiated whole -- the 'pacha' as the Incas called it) do seem to be brought together in Great Village especially: somehow one senses the filling station Bishop saw in Brazil (the source of the sad, two-noted tune of the untempered clogs whose sounds evoke the well-regulated ones of another country), the Esso Station that has been replaced by Wilsons Gas Stops (no apostrophe possible, one supposes), -- and yet another, unnamed one: Robert Lowell's only use of the phrase 'filling station', which is to be found in a review he did of Sylvia Plath, and which is the source of the "defeated yellow, / dim against the bright sky of a high window" of the end of my poem.

Thank you very much for your comment. I hope you will be able to come to Great Village soon. -- JAB

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John Barnstead

I retired in 2014 after forty years of teaching Russian language and literature. I'm a past president of the Elizabeth Bishop Society of Nova Scotia.

Sandra Barry

I am a poet, independent scholar, freelance editor, and secretary of the Elizabeth Bishop Society of Nova Scotia.

Suzie LeBlanc

I am a professional singer who recently has become a great admirer of Elizabeth Bishop's writing. I am also fond of walking and nature. I became involved with the Elizabeth Bishop Centenary because I wanted to have her poems set to music so that I could sing them.